McCarthyism: When history is just a vibe (2)

When Robert Warshow reviewed The Crucible in 1953 he noted that Arthur Miller had shown an "almost contemptuous lack of interest in the particularities -- which is to say, the reality -- of the Salem trials." This is indisputably true. At every turn, the playwright flaunts his proud, willful ignorance of the historical reality of 1692 Salem. But Miller was not unconcerned about all "particularities". He saw fit to invent one crucial bit of back story and place it at the heart of his drama.

In 1996 Miller explained his "Eureka!" moment in The New Yorker:

Elizabeth Proctor had been the orphaned Abigail’s mistress, and they had lived together in the same small house until Elizabeth fired the girl. By this time, I was sure, John Proctor had bedded Abigail, who had to be dismissed most likely to appease Elizabeth. There was bad blood between the two women now.

Miller's "discovery" was a work of pure imagination. There is no evidence for it (and much against it). But the man had his reasons.

My own marriage of twelve years was teetering and I knew more than I wished to know about where the blame lay. That John Proctor the sinner might overturn his paralyzing personal guilt and become the most forthright voice against the madness around him was a reassurance to me, and, I suppose, an inspiration: it demonstrated that a clear moral outcry could still spring even from an ambiguously unblemished soul.

Our sainted author is praising himself with faint damns here. His marriage was failing because he was having an affair with Marilyn Monroe. He was getting ready to jettison the wife who supported him when he was a struggling critic and playwright so he could take up with a rich, famous, and beautiful film star.

William Styron described Miller as "strangely and fanatically opportunistic." This is certainly true when it comes to writing The Crucible. The adulterous husband invented an adulterous hero. The doctrinaire communist wants to pretend that real communists are as rare as witches. The slinking propagandist now dons the mantle of a fearless truth-teller.

Miller had to invent his "history" out of whole cloth. Not only is there no evidence of an affair between John Procter and Abigail Williams, there is no evidence the two ever met. Even more telling is the fact that the John Procter of The Crucible is a man in his 30s while Miller makes Abigail Williams a young woman of 16 or 17.

The real John Procter was 59. Abigail Williams was 11 or 12.

If Miller had kept to the facts, his flawed hero would have been much worse than a man who gave in to a moment of weakness. He would have ben a child rapist. Even a leftwing New York audience would have trouble taking that kind of man as a hero in 1953.

Carol Iannone:

the single animus that has long driven Miller's work-the willed resentment toward American society, the overwrought, obdurate sense of condemnation and outrage. In Miller's hands, tragedy consists not in the individual's encounter with solemn powers greater than himself. Rather, tragedy is the failure to stand against patent corruption and foolishness, in the form of such life-crushing American villains as demanding fathers, witless salesmen, and witch-hunting anti-Communists.

In his apologia for The Crucible, Miller shows just how deeply he was enmeshed in the mental world created by Willi Munzenberg.

Stephen Koch:

Munzenberg provided two generations of people on the left with what we might call the forum of righteousness. More than any other person of his era, he developed what may well be the leading moral illusion of the twentieth century: the notion that in the modern age the principal arena of the moral life, the true realm of good and evil, is politics.

Miller created a wholly fictional John Procter as his hero: a flawed man who achieved nobility by denouncing witch-hunters. In The Crucible private frailty is redeemed via public words. It is hard not to suspect that that Miller was hoping to do just that for himself. His oblique attack on Joseph McCarthy serves as a counter-weight to his failings as a husband.

Roger Scruton described this mindset perfectly:

For what matters is what people say, not what they do, and what they say is redeemed by their theories, however stupidly or carelessly pursued, and with whatever disregard for real people.

It seems to have worked. Despite his manifest cruelty as a husband and father, Miller still serves as a sort of ersatz-Orwell for the American Left.

Related:

Arthur Miller’s Missing Act
For all the public drama of Arthur Miller’s career—his celebrated plays (including Death of a Salesman and The Crucible), his marriage to Marilyn Monroe, his social activism—one character was absent: the Down-syndrome child he deleted from his life.

Joseph Epstein:

Arthur Miller, a man always ready to offer moral lessons to others, to entire nations in fact, when he himself had done something in his personal life most people would consider morally repugnant. Miller often fell into a sermonizing mode. He was never uncomfortable instructing people how to live, or governments how to conduct their business. He spoke at all times with an unrestrained moral authority, dispensing advice on right conduct. Pity he didn't take that advice to heart with his own son instead of dispensing it so generously to the rest of us. All saints must be judged guilty before proven innocent, as George Orwell noted, and Arthur Miller, a false saint, fails the test.

McCarthyism: When history is just a vibe

When journalists talk about the McCarthy era they rarely cite nonfiction books. After smugly declaring that "McCarthy never caught a spy", they name drop Arthur Miller and his play The Crucible.

Although it is ostensibly about the Salem witch trials, we all know [nudge, nudge, wink, wink] that it is about a different, more recent witch hunt.

Though highly lauded, the play is really nothing more than competent agitprop. Like all such works it blends facts with plausible lies to obscure the truth and promote a Big Lie. It is a case study in mendacity and self-glorification.

It is a mark of our low, dishonest age that The Crucible is treated as a serious study of the "Red Scare" and that Miller is held up as some sort of moral guide.

ii

A litany of lies and evasions

Robert Warshow eviscerated the play and Miller's pretensions when it was first staged. As he pointed out, the playwright seems to say much while he actually understands very little of the events he is mining for his little exercise in propaganda.

The 'universality' of Mr. Miller's play belongs neither to literature nor to history, but to that journalism of limp erudition which assumes that events are to be understood by referring them to categories, and which is therefore never at a loss for a comment. Just as in Death of a Salesman Mr. Miller sought to present 'the American' by eliminating so far as possible the 'non-essential' facts which might have made his protagonist a particular American, so in The Crucible he reveals at every turn his almost contemptuous lack of interest in the particularities -- which is to say, the reality -- of the Salem trials.

OK, so The Crucible has nothing to tell us about the Salem witch trials. All the smart people know Miller wasn't really writing about 1692 Massachusetts -- his concerns were more contemporary.

Unfortunately, Miller is no better at addressing those concerns.

For let us indeed not be misled. Mr. Miller has nothing to say about the Salem trials and makes only the flimsiest pretense that he has. The Crucible was written to say something about Alger Hiss and Owen Lattimore, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Senator McCarthy, the actors who have lost their jobs on radio and television, in short the whole complex that is spoken of, with a certain lowering of the voice, as 'the present atmosphere.' And yet not say anything about that either.

This transmutation -- to write about "McCarthyism" by writing about Salem -- represents the foundational deceit of Miller's play. Leave aside the vast differences between a tiny 17th century frontier village and a giant 20th century superpower. All the smart people in 1953 knew witches did not exist. Miller wants us to think the same is true of the communists. Yet he, himself, had spent years in the movement, had seen their methods, and had even wrote for their publications.

Miller wrote The Crucible after the conviction of the Rosenbergs. He believed them innocent; we now know they were guilty. So, on that account alone, we have to acknowledge that the play was born out of literal disinformation. That is not entirely Miller's fault.* This misperception on his part may have been understandable in 1953.

But what should we say of the teachers and journalists who continue to promote the play as a window into the world of the "Red Scare"? They know -- or should know -- that there really were communist spies in Washington and communist cells in Hollywood.

Nicholas von Hoffman:

Point by point, Joe McCarthy got it all wrong and yet was still closer to the truth than those who ridiculed him.

"The present atmosphere" that was Miller's target had less to do with "popular hysteria" and much more to do with serious threats to our nation and culture.

*It must be noted, however, that until his last days, Miller always minimized Stalinist crimes and downplayed the Party's influence in Hollywood and New York's theater scene.

McCarthyism: "The indefinable "ism" (2)

Another charge against McCarthy is that he somehow unleashed a reign of terror that stifled dissent and unleashed a wave of conformity across America. In its most dramatic retelling, Arthur Miller's The Crucible (1953), all of America had turned into Salem Massachusetts circa 1692.

In McCarthy and his Enemies, Buckley and Bozell have great fun reciting all the pronouncements by proud liberals who filled newspapers and journals with their lamentations over McCarthy's "silencing" of his opposition. The simple fact of the matter is that the best papers and most prestigious magazines were always, loudly and prolifically, anti-McCarthy and anti-anti-communist. The senator's influence has been dramatically exaggerated:

Yet the Grand Sachem of McCarthyism, McCarthy himself, is meanwhile unable to inflict his reign of terror in his own bailiwick: in a period of 18 months, the University of Wisconsin invited Eleanor Roosevelt, Norman Cousins, Owen Lattimore and James Carey to complain about McCarthy's reign of terror to the student body.

The absurdity of the narrative is made clear by The Crucible itself. Miller's little piece of agitprop was staged at the height of McCarthy's popularity and influence. It was not shut down; the author was not jailed. Instead, he was showered with laurels.

Even that old Stalinist Richard Rovere conceded that attacking McCarthy "is just about as dangerous as drinking my morning cup of coffee".

It is worth noting that Arthur Miller, in public the fierce defender of individual conscience, was, in private, a slavish follower and sometime enforcer of the party line set down by Moscow.

In his testimony before the HUAC, Miller stated that he “had never been under Communist discipline.” But his behavior as Wayne and then as Miller shows otherwise. As Wayne, he followed the Browder phase of perestrokia in literature. When the tide shifted away, Miller followed the Fosterite policy that the only good literature was the politically correct kind. Miller was not only a party member, he was also an obedient one, who was willing to submerge his own ideas of good literature and politics to the shifting vagaries of the party line.
Ron Capshaw

Moreover, even as he (publicly) railed against witch-hunts and defended free thought, he was so subservient to the Party that he let it choose his psychiatrists for him. (During their marriage, he forced Marilyn Monroe to switch to Party-approved shrinks. The results speak for themselves.)

ii

In the current retelling of the narrative the goal posts have shifted. McCarthy is no longer an existential threat but he is still bad, bad, very bad.

He was not a would-be dictator. He did not threaten our constitutional system, but he did hurt many who lived under it.

At his best, he produced evidence that the government's security procedures were sometimes remiss. But his critics were right: he never uncovered a Communist. He spent his days searching for the new Julius Rosenberg, the new Alger Hiss. He wound up settling for Owen Lattimore and Annie Lee Moss.

David Oshinsky, A Conspiracy so Immense

This recalls Richard Rovere's "argument" when he was covering McCarthy for The New Yorker:

Richard Rovere, formerly an editor of the Communist New Masses, later The New Yorker’s Washington correspondent, at the National Press Club bar, holding forth on the hundreds of lives Joe McCarthy had destroyed. “Name one,” I ask. Silence, then, “Well, he’s shacking up with Roy Cohn, isn’t he? And how many spies has he caught?”

Here we see a writer for the illustrious New Yorker playing by the same rules as the gutter-dwelling Drew Pearson as even Oshinsky would have to admit:

Drew Pearson had collected a file on the subject, filled with dubious affidavits from men who claimed to have had sexual relations with McCarthy. Pearson said nothing in print, preferring the cocktail grapevine instead.

A Conspiracy so Immense

Any honest historian has to acknowledge that Oshinsky's "never caught a spy" trope is also out of date. The list of Soviet assets who came across McCarthy's radar is remarkable. That they managed to hide for decades has less to do with McCarthy's failings than it does with unnecessary governmental secrecy and executive branch coverups.

McCarthyism: The indefinable "ism"

In his interview with Leo Cherne, WFB pressed his guest to define what made McCarthy uniquely evil. That is, why are McCarthy's methods or McCarthy's rhetoric out of bounds when they appear indistinguishable from those of other politicians and public figures.

Cherne, to his credit, addresses the question head-on. For him, McCarthy is detestable because he made reckless charges of treason. against men like George Marhsall.

It is a telling point. For six decades McCarthy's reckless attacks on Marshall stood as the worst example of his excesses and a reason to treat him as especially dangerous.

Then a really strange thing happened: Donald Trump was elected. More importantly, Hillary Clinton lost. Suddenly, baseless accusations of treason became the highest form of patriotism. Adam Schiff turbocharged his political career by making them against Trump and many of his aides. Rachel Maddow banked millions of dollars by trafficking in them.

This makes WFB's main point. Everyone is expected to be horrified by "McCarthyism" but no one can define it nor explain why it is singularly evil.

ii

It is still rewarding to read Buckley and Bozell's McCarthy and His Enemies* because that is a main theme the authors address. McCarthy's rhetoric and methods are condemned while other politicians are celebrated for "fiery speeches" and "dogged investigations".

Take public congressional hearings. When McCarthy confronts witnesses, it is the return of the Spanish Inquisition, a replay of the Salem witch trials. Yet the Left loves those sort of hearings in the right context.

The inquisitorial method is "understandable" or "indispensable" or even "desirable" if it is used to uncover or embarrass Wall Street racketeers (the Nye committee), the anti-union practices of management (the LaFollette committee), or the financial angels of right-wing organizations (the Buchanan committee). But the same method even if more restrained and equitable in its application is outrageous and fascist when used to lay bare the activities of American fellow travelers (the Committee on Un-American Activities), to expose the ideological impact of the Institute of Pacific relations (the McCarran committee), or to look into pro communism in the Voice of America (the McCarthy committee). 

Buckley and Bozell are scathing in their handling of the putative anti-communists who professed themselves shocked by McCarthy's methods while professing to support his aims. Since those critics rarely condemned other investigations, the authors doubt their sincerity.

For it is McCarthy's aims that demonstrably disconcert and frighten so many of his critics. They disapprove of McCarthy's method when it is used to further McCarthy's aims but like it fine when it is used to further their own.

There may be a few intellectually honest critics of McCarthy who also denounced the televised hearings into organized crime and labor racketeering. The vast bulk of the punditry class adopted the Leninist approach of "Who/whom" when assessing those investigations. Robert F. Kennedy was good and noble when he was investigating the Teamsters and Jimmy Hoffa; it was a blot on his character when he worked for McCarthy investigating Stalin's American minions. Senator Sam Ervin supported segregation and opposed the civil rights movement for decades; he became a liberal folk hero when he chaired the Watergate hearing that helped "get Nixon"

Twenty years after McCarthy's death WFB returned to this theme. Discussing the now celebrated Hollywood 10, he noted that they went to jail "for committing the same offense for which Judge Sirica sentenced Gordon Liddy to twenty years in jail, getting for himself in return the Man of the Year award from Time magazine: contempt of a duly constituted government board of inquiry."

Today we note that Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro went to prison for defying the January 6 committee -- a purely partisan ad hoc star chamber created by Nancy Pelosi to get Trump and his allies. By what standard is that a just outcome but the Hollywood 10 were martyrs for defying HUAC-- a long-standing committee with bi-partisan support?

Hyprocrisy like all lies can reveal important truths once you spot it. In the case of the polymorphic "nightmare" which is called "McCarthyism", the key point is this: many of the loudest voices against the senator were anti-McCarthy because they were, at their core, anti-anti-communist. Some were still true believers in the Bolshevik dream or adherents to the Popular Front myths fostered by Willi Munzenberg. Others were liberals too embarrassed or too prideful to face up to the Soviet reality they once supported.

iii

Another mark of the elastic nature of the term "McCarthyism" is the way it is applied to activities where the senator had zero involvement. McCarthy had nothing to with Hollywood screenwriters or the Hollywood blacklist. The deaths of Laurence Duggan and Harry Dexter White which so vexed Drew Pearson and Edward R. Murrow had no connection to his investigations.

Yet, somehow, hearings which occurred before the Wheeling speech or which took place in the House of Representatives still get the "McCarthyism" label.

Hard to ignore the fact that the only points of commonality we find here is: 1) the investigations targeted communist subversion and espionage and 2) liberals attacked the investigators and covered up for the guilty.

It is obviously not the political methods of McCarthyism that arouse the indignation of those who invoke its specter today, but the political ideas with which McCarthy was associated, specifically his anti-communism. This is admitted with disarming frankness by New Left professor Ellen Schrecker in No Ivory Tower, a tendacious book about effects of McCarthyism on the university: "after all, what made McCarthy a Mccarthyite was not his bluster but his anti-communism mission".
Collier and Horowitz, Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties

Senator McCarthy rallied anti-communists and patriots, but his memory -- his enduring myth and media image -- has proved even more useful to the anti-anti-communists. They made McCarthy representative of all vigorous anti-communists.

Over time, anti-anti-communism became, not just the dominant attitude in popular culture, but the only acceptable attitude for right thinking people. (Willi Munzenberg's methods kept working even after he broke with Stalin and was murdered for his effrontery). "McCarthyism" became the all-purpose argument for rehabilitating obviously guilty spies and traitors such as Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg.

McCarthy ceased to be a legitimate subject for historical investigation. Instead he became a symbol of evil, the man who could not -- must not-- be defended. Further, one must not even give the appearance of seeming to defend him. Any discussion of American communism was expected to begin with a ritualistic denunciation of McCarthy, the Man, and the Ism. (This fealty rite continues to this day-- even at National Review founded by "McCarthyites" Wm. F. Buckley and L. Brent Bozell).

The Bicentenial year of 1976, ironically, represents Munzenberg's posthumous triumphus. Lillian Hellman published Scoundrel Time -- her third volume of dishonest memoirs-- to wide acclaim. Critics lauded it; celebrities hastened to pay obeisance. She appeared in glossy ads for Blackglama Mink. When Hellman appeared as a presenter at the Oscars in 1977, Hollywood gave her a standing ovation. Jane Fonda was cast to play her in the movie Julia. That movie, based on a wholly fictional autobiography, would garner 11 Oscar nominations and would win 3 awards.

iv

Few people know that the House Committee on Un-American Activities was created at the instigation of liberal congressman Samuel Dickstein in order to fight the Nazi threat and its fifth column in America. Dickstein promised that he could "name you one hundred spies" and claimed that there were 50,000 fascists in just Connecticut. The congressman was willing, even eager to "name names" and put them in the Congressional Record. (He refused to include their denials.)

Far from condeming Dickstein, progressive groups supported him and the congressional investigations. He even went on to become a justice on the New York Supreme Court.

Decades later Clio finally delivered her punchline.

There in the Soviet archives was the codename CROOK -- assigned to none other that Rep. Samuel Dickstein (D-NY). The UnAmerican Activities committee owed its birth to a paid agent of Soviet intelligence.

*Some daring publisher should bring this book back in print with a new introduction to bring it up to date with what we now know about Soviet penetrations of the New Deal.

McCarthyism: When zeal is no substitute for strategy

Even anti-communists are subject to Conquest's Law.

William F. Buckley discussing McCarthyism on Firing Line in 1966.

The discussion is quite good- courteous, logical, and free of the pointless pyrotechnics we see on cable TV today.

I am struck by WFB's admission that "Joe McCarthy discovered anti-Communism in 1950".

One can grant the sincerity of McCarthy's commitment to the cause while, at the same time, recognizing that the zeal of a new convert is no substitute for careful research or clear-eyed strategy. In fact, naive enthusiasm can be dangerous as the case of Sir Robert Peel illustrates.

Andre Maurois:

Like all intelligent men who are not in any way creative, Sir Robert Peel was dangerously sympathetic towards the creations of others. Incapable of formulating a system, he threw himself voraciously on those he came across, and applied them more vigorously than would their inventors.

Cherne notes that McCarthy was supported by the communists in his 1946 race against Robert LaFollet. So that seems to confirm what Robert Conquest wrote in Reflections on a Ravaged Century.

Safe to say that the communists miscalculated slightly in backing Joe McCarthy. But that is politics.

McCarthyism: Seeds of Destruction

For three years after the Wheeling speech, Sen. Joseph McCarthy gained power and influence despite the strident opposition of journalists, academics, the White House, and Democrats in the Senate. After the 1952 election he should have been poised for even bigger and better things. The Republicans controlled the Senate and Eisenhower was president. Yet Ike succeeded where Truman and Tydings had failed: he put an end to "McCarthyism".

Thomas Reeves:

In his State of the Union message of February 2 [1953] Eisenhower repeated a controversial statement he made in Green Bay during the campaign: the primary responsibility for rooting subversion the federal government, he said, rested squarely upon the executive branch.

In one sense, Ike was just stating the obvious: in our constitutional system the executive branch is responsible for the security measures in the federal agencies. Congress had neither the power nor the resources to hunt spies and security risks. It also seems clear that the president was sending a message to his party in congress -- a veiled order to stand down on the subversion issue.

Republicans were in charge and the last thing Eisenhower wanted was the distraction of intramural squabbling. After all, he had rose to prominence within George Marshall's army where the man in charge was left alone to get on with the job.

Not a message McCarthy was open to.

Ralph de Toledano:

With the election of General Eisenhower, for which Joe could take some credit, and the Republican control of the Senate, Joe became rash. As chairman of the Senate Government Operations Committee and its powerful Permanent Investigation subcommittee, he was in the catbird seat. He had the authority and the subpoena power to get at the evidence that had been previously withheld. But against the advice of his strongest and most savvy allies, he passed up as counsel Robert Morris—highly knowledgeable, formerly of the Office of Naval Intelligence, thorough, and respected. McCarthy instead chose Roy Cohn—brash, unprincipled, and inexperienced.

Reeves:

With the arrival of Cohn, a new chapter in McCarthy's life began, one that would see him elevated to even greater heights of international notoriety and plunged to the lowest depths of political ruin and personal despair.

Ike posed a far more dangerous threat than Truman. He was not just president, he was also the head of the Republican party. Up to now McCarthy enjoyed solid support from his party in the Senate. He could not count on that if he decided to battle the Eisenhower administration.

Here again Roy Cohn represented a problem for McCarthy. He had no loyalty to the GOP and no experience on Capital Hill. As M. Stanton Evans notes, Cohn was "a liberal Democrat by upbringing and affiliation".

Before joining McCarthy Cohn had come to public's attention as a prosecutor within the Truman justice department .

McCarthyism: The long shadow of a false narrative

Sen. Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist crusade lasted only four short years. Seven years after the Wheeling speech he was dead. The caricature of the man embedded in the historical narrative has persisted for decades. (Every one knows McCarthy is bad even if they do not know what he actually did.

Long after his fall, McCarthy and his supporters haunted the nightmares of the leading public intellectuals in the U.S. His brief ascendency upended their once rosy view of democracy.

In 1949, Arthur Schlesinger confidently announced that “we are changing from a market society to an administrative society.” For twenty years urban progressivism was in the driver's seat. FDR had won four elections while he expanded the federal government and staffed his alphabet agencies with intellectuals and the graduates of the best universities. Then unsuitable men like McCarthy and Nixon had garnered public support by attacking the competence, honesty, and loyalty of these same progressive avatars.

This demanded an explanation.

One explanation had the now obvious advantage of being true:

There is no mystery about Joe McCarthy. He just doesn't like Communists. What is so peculiar about this point of view that it calls for an explanation.
John T. Flynn

For there is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: he, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing. And with some justification.
Irving Kristol

For young, ambitious intellectuals in the 1950s, this viewpoint was a nonstarter. It was an article of faith that the internal communist threat was nonexistent and that McCarthy was a liar. The key question, then, was why did millions of Americans believe his absurd lies?

One influential group of scholars and pundits thought they found the answer in psychology and sociology.

In The New American Right (1955) seven contributors set out to explain the McCarthy phenomenon and the nature of post- New Deal conservatism. It is a classic example of the Left diagnosing conservatives instead of debating them. (Here again we see ostensible liberals adopting the methods of LeninThink.

The editor, future neocon Daniel Bell, found McCarthy puzzling and in need of explanation because he had done the unthinkable: he attacked “intellecuals, Harvard, Anglophiles, internationalists, and the Army”. Bell could only conclude that the movement was not a rational reaction to real issues:
“The theme of conspiracy haunts the mind of the new rightists.”

These “new conservatives” fell victim to conspiracy theories because they were uneducated, close-minded, losing ground economically, or anxious about their social status.

The net message was clear. The new, post-McCarthy right was not a legitimate political movement. It was symptomatic of social and psychological pathologies. There was no reason to engage its arguments or care about its issue. Better to ignore and marginalize them.

As I said, classic Lenintink:

Don't argue with them, Make them stink in the nose of the world. Make people curse and abominate them, Make them shudder with horror.
Willi Munzenberg

This line of thinking also underlies much of Richard Hofstadter's work – especially Anti-intellectualism in American Life and The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Hofstadter took to calling this new right wing “pseudo-conservative” – a term he borrowed from Marxist thinker Theodor Adorno of the Frankfurt School.

James Pierson:

According to liberal writers like Richard Hofstadter and, Daniel Bell, and others, the far right were disconnected from reality, its followers semi-delusional in their belief that communism represented a domestic threat to the United States.

In short, a multi-decade academic industry took root that was based on an egregious fallacy. “Commie subversion” was not a paranoid delusion; it was a central feature of Soviet statecraft and a prime function of the CPUSA. Once again, McCarthy was directionally correct while his critics were wildly wrong.

It is also worth noting that while Bell, Hofstadter, et. al. were sorely vexed by rightwing conspiracy theories, they ignored the popular leftwing conspiracy theories such as those which posited grovernmental frame-ups of Alger Hiss, Judith Coplon, and the Rosenbergs.

McCarthyism: The competence canard (2)

The initial case against Sen. Joseph McCarthy declared that he was engaged in a veritable witch-hunt-- a demagogic campaign against an imaginary problem. He confused liberals with Communists and progressive idealists with Stalinist agents. He conjured up fanciful networks of conspirators out of thin air to frighten ignorant and parochial voters.

When the VENONA files and Soviet archives came to light, this leftwing dogma was shattered. It turned out that the New Deal was penetrated from top to bottom by conspiratorial networks working for the benefit and at the direction of Stalin's spy organs.

It was (and is) an article of faith among the Left that McCarthy was, is, and must ever be “unredeemable”. So the revelations created a big problem.

What to do? What to do?

The “solution” united far Left academics, New Republic liberals, and neocons like Ron Radosh. The new narrative seemed to address the most troubling facts while still condemning McCarthy: There had been spies in the 1930s and during WWII, BUT Harry Truman and J. Edgar Hoover had cleared them all out by 1950. So McCarthy was still whipping up public hysteria over a nonexistent problem.

While it is true that Truman instituted procedures to remove security risks he was hardly a determined redhunter. He took action only after his party suffered a landslide defeat in the 1946 elections and lost both the House and Senate.

To critics, the Truman security program looked like a political fig leaf rather than a dedicated effort to identify and root out the “Red webs” which stretched throughout the whole of the federal government.

That is what the “never caught a spy” canard attempts to hide. McCarthy and other critics were not hunting spies: they were warning that our spy hunting bureaucracy was failing to carry out its mission.

On this question McCarthy and his allies were right. His critics were wrong then and are wrong today.

Truman himself never owned up to the unprecedented scope of the Soviet apparatus that had penetrated FDR's alphabet agencies. At every turn he was prone to minimize the evidence when it was presented to him, to dismiss credible charges as red herrings, and to attack whistle blowers. For fifty years after the Katyn massacre only one government organization published the truth about the Soviets' guilt: The Madden committe in the House of Representatives. Truman opposed this inquiry and his State Department lobbied against its formation.

Truman wanted to abolish the House Committee on Unamerican Activities-- a committee which actually did “catch a real spy”. It also identified Russian assets who went on to service the atomic spies and the Britain's Cambridge Ring. Neither Truman nor Hoover cared to follow up.

The Truman administration also had an odd penchant for defending Soviet agents when they came under public scrutiny. Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, Lauchlin Currie, and Laurence Duggan were all defended by Truman or members of his cabinet.

This is hard to reconcile with the modern image of Truman as a more effective spy hunter than McCarthy.

The Truman security program was more political theater than anything else. HST's closest political aide admitted as much to Carl Bernstein decades later.

"There was no substantive problem. It was a political problem. We did not believe there was a real problem. A problem was being manufactured. There was a certain element of hysteria."

Clark Clifford

As was the case with the Tydings Committee, Truman and his allies were vexed by the political embarrassment the communists presented to his party; the risk they presented to the country was of lesser concern.

As a consequence the Truman security program was half-hearted and insincere. Its primary purposes was to show that the executive branch was doing something about the problem of Stalinist infiltration of the executive branch without embarrassing the Democrats or the administrative state.

McCarthy was slipshod in his methods and sometimes exaggerated the danger. The Truman administration was consciously dishonest in addressing the problem. Yet, the anti-McCarthy narrative is so locked in place that even some conservatives and most neocons praise Truman in order to condemn McCarthy.

McCarthy must remain unredeemable no matter what new revelations come from the archives.

Rejoice! He is risen!

Now upon the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they came unto the sepulchre, bringing the spices which they had prepared, and certain others with them.

And they found the stone rolled away from the sepulchre.

And they entered in, and found not the body of the Lord Jesus.

And it came to pass, as they were much perplexed thereabout, behold, two men stood by them in shining garments:

And as they were afraid, and bowed down their faces to the earth, they said unto them, Why seek ye the living among the dead?

He is not here, but is risen: remember how he spake unto you when he was yet in Galilee,

Saying, The Son of man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and the third day rise again.

And they remembered his words,

And returned from the sepulchre, and told all these things unto the eleven, and to all the rest.

It was Mary Magdalene, and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and other women that were with them, which told these things unto the apostles.

And their words seemed to them as idle tales, and they believed them not.

Then arose Peter, and ran unto the sepulchre; and stooping down, he beheld the linen clothes laid by themselves, and departed, wondering in himself at that which was come to pass.

Luke 24: 1-12

McCarthyism: The competence canard

McCarthy's most effective enemies went to great pains to paint themselves as committed anti-communists. They claimed that McCarthy was an unserious, perhaps dishonest, crusader, while they were serious, competent opponents of Stalin and his machinations.

In his famous CBS News program “See It Now” Edward R. Murrow put it this way:

When the record is finally written, as it will be one day, it will answer the question, Who has helped the Communist cause and who has served his country better, Senator McCarthy or I? I would like to be remembered by the answer to that question.

Murrow and Co. won that battle. The were the smart anti-communists and could be trusted while McCarthy was a menace and a useful idiot for Stalin.

But was he right? Were he and his allies more competent and dedicated to the American cause than the senator? Were they really more effective adversaries of the communists?

The evidence suggests that they were not. The critics, like almost all later historians obfuscated about the issue at hand and asked us to judge McCarthy by the wrong standard (“he never found a spy”). If the senator often was too quick to lump fellow travelers with actual spies, his most famous opponents were stubbornly blind to the evidence against actual spies and potential mSoviet assets.

II

We can easily dismiss McCarthy's most persistent critic – Drew Pearson. His anti-communist stance was purely for show. Any man who employes two Soviet assets as reporters is hardly an astute investigator of Soviet subversion.

Pearson was also consistently wrong about the public spy cases. He defended Harry Dexter White, Lauchlin Currie, and Laurence Duggan when they were named by ex-operatives like Elizabeth Bently and Whittaker Chambers as Soviet agents.

The VENONA files confirm the guilt of all three.

Murrows record is not much better. He denounced the accusers of Laurence Duggan – a friend and former colleague – "A dead man's character is being destroyed." At CBS he hired Stephen E. Fleischman to work on the award-winning "CBS Reports". Fleischman was a member of CPUSA throughout the 1950s.

Murrow promoted the Democrat canard that Annie Lee Moss was a victim of mistaken identity. She wasn't: she was a CPUSA member which made her a risky emplyee for the Army's code office. If Murrow had admitted that then he would have had to concede that McCarthy had a point in questioning the existing security procedures.

Murrow's campaign was not just against McCarthy. He was also an intense critic of most internal security procedures in the federal bureasucracy. Take the case of Milo Radulovich. As Murrow framed the issue, the Army's security program was so irrational that they were punishing Radulovich because his sister and immigrant father subscribed to some publications from their home country of Ukraine, According to Murrow this was anti-communist paranoia in which unfounded suspicions merged with guilt by association to deny a man his dream of becoming a meteorologist.

Years later, Radulovich's brother-in-law admitted that he was a member of the CPUSA as was his wife (Radulovich's sister.) They remained loyal party members even after Khrushchev's speech and the brutal occupation of Eastern Europe.

The case of Milo Radulovich, then, is much more complex than Murrow and other enemies of McCarthy led us to believe.

Elmer Davis was anti-McCarthy long before Murrow took up his cudgels. During WWII he headed up the Office of War Information. Based on VENONA decrypts, the OWI may rank as the #1 agency for spies per capita. Under Davis the OWI worked to suppress the truth about the Katyn massacre and the Soviet's plan to Stalinize Poland. After the war he defended Alger Hiss and denounced witnesses like Whittaker Chambers as “fake patriots” and “professional anti-communists.”

At a minimum Davies's counterintelligence skills are somewhat suspect. Moreover, when he attacked McCarthy and other congressional investigators, he was, in essence, working to suppress the truth about his own failings at OWI.

Histories of this era never acknowledge this last point. Like the Tydings committee, the motivations of McCarthy's critics are always treated as pure.

Coaching and Cowpens

At the beginning of the American Revolution, the Continental armies lost more battles than they won.

No surprise. The British army was one of the best in the world. Washington's army was in the process of creation. On the day of battle colonial militia often made up a large portion of his forces. These men frequently broke ranks and fled when faced with British bayonets.

Nonetheless, colonial officers still treated these poorly trained and equipped troops as if they were well-drilled professionals. Then, when their line broke and the battle was lost, they filled their reports and letters with complaints about the militia and their cowardice and refusal to stand and fight.

The Revolution was won when Americans found generals who were willing to adjust their tactics and strategy instead of insisting that their soldiers carry out conventional orders that were beyond their training and ability.

II

Daniel Morgan was such a leader. At Saratoga he understood that his company of Virginia riflemen could have a decisive role. The key was to take advantage of their long range accuracy to disrupt and destroy British command and control. At Bemis Heights and Freeman's Farm his tactics denied Gen. John Burgoyne the decisive victory he needed to save his army.

In the Southern Campaign he first wore down British forces by avoiding battle. (His commander, Nathaniel Greene, understood as Mao did, “that there is in guerrilla warfare no such thing as a decisive battle.”

At Cowpens (17 January 1781) Morgan chose to stand and fight against the pursuing forces led by Banastre Tarleton. The ground was favorable (with the Broad river at their backs, retreat was not an option for the militia) and British troops were tired and frustrated after chasing Morgan across South Carolina.

What sets Morgan's battle plan apart is his handling of the militia which made up half or more of his army. He did not include them in his main battle line nor did he expect them to stand up to a British bayonet charge. Instead, he placed them forward of his regulars and asked them to fire two volleys. Then, they would withdraw behind his regulars.

Historian Robert Wright notes that part of Morgan's tactical genius was that he did not “ask a man to do more than he was physically capable of doing." He did not pretend that militia could stand up to the experienced troops at close quarters. At the same time he did not ignore what capabilities they did possess nor did he treat them with contempt.

The other key to the victory was that Morgan made sure that his Continentals understood that the militia's withdrawal was planned rather than evidence of an impending rout. He went from campfire to campfire the night before the battle – encouraging the men and explaining his plans.

Morgan's leadership and insight won a signal victory. In less than an hour he had routed Tarleton (over 80% casualties) and sent the remnants racing back to Cornwallis. He had shaped his tactics to fit the forces he had at hand in a rare feat of flexibility combined with insight.

It is remarkable that it was the poorly educated backwoodsman, not the better educated generals who had the insight and intelligence to get the most out of the militia.

III

When it comes to football coaches, there are few men with that capacity and courage. Instead, the prevailing ethos is “losses are acceptable if they can be blamed on injuries or a weak roster or dumb players.

From Ron Jaworski, Games That Changed the Game:

With some teams, the difference between their first-string and back-up quarterback isn't that much, but if your number one guy is a superstar, its an entirely different story. One time, Jon Gruden and I were attending a Colts practice before one of our ESPN games, and we were standing next to their offensive coordinator, Tom Moore. Tom is 'old school' in every sense of the word. He's been in the NFL for over thirty years and has signaled in every play call of Peyton Manning's career. As we watched, we were surprised to see Manning taking virtually all the reps in the session. Jon asked Tom why he wasn't giving some snaps to Peyton's backups. Moore is a man of few words, but when he talks, those words carry weight. He looked us both in the eye, paused for a moment, then said in that gravelly voice of his, 'Fellas, if "18" goes down, we're fucked. And we don't practice fucked.'

Old school coaches like Don Shula built their teams for resilience when things went badly. Shula twice took teams to the Super Bowl when forced to play most of the season with his back-up quarterback. In his undefeated 1972 season, Earl Morrall, not Bob Griese, started a majority of Miami's 17 victories.

Owners and fans now accept the idea that without a healthy franchise QB a team is doomed to mediocrity or worse. No one remembers that Joe Gibbs won three Super Bowls with 3 different QBs (two of them castoffs from other teams while the third was a sixth round draft pick) .

Bill Walsh created the West Coast Offense out of necessity when he coached in Cincinnati. Lacking both a strong-armed QB and a powerful running game, he developed his offensive system which revolutionized the pro passing game.

Now coaches and coordinators are often given a pass of a year or more because “it takes time for players to learn a new system”. In a league with a salary cap, free agency, and short playing careers, why do journalists accept that a coach should insist that players adapt to his system instead of adapting the system to the players he has? To accept this excuse we have to admit that coaches are calling plays that they know their players are unlikely to execute.

McCarthyism: No sauce for the gander (part 2)

One McCarthy opponent deserves special consideration. Sen. Millward Tydings (D-MD) tried to put an end to McCarthy's career right at the beginning of his crusade. He chaired the committee which investigated the Wheeling speech and the veracity of Joe's charges (Subcommittee on the Investigation of Loyalty of State Department Employees ). Its report is still routinely cited as proof that McCarthy lied and had no basis for accusing the Truman administration of being soft on subversion.

Tydings was a segregationist Democrat who voted with the Southern bloc that obstructed civil rights legislation for decades. In defense of the fillibuster Tydings declared that “It was cloture that crucified Christ on the cross.” All this is rarely mentioned by those who portray his campaign against McCarthy as a battle for civil liberties.

The Tydings committee also set the template for many of the “McCarthy hearings”. The Senator was the one called to face accusations, not the one making them. Far from having unchallenged power, he was challenged at every turn.

Tydings is specifically interesting for his peronal connections to the pro-Stalin elements in the FDR administration.

Tydings married the daughter of Joseph E. Davies, who FDR appointed ambassador to Moscow. While there he vouched for the fairness of the purge trials during Stalin's Great Terror.

After he returned he wrote a memoir, Mission to Moscow that even Soviet propagandists thought overdid it in its praise of Stalin. He was part of the clique which tried to purge long-time Russia experts like Loy Henderson and George Kennan from the State Department because they were insufficiently pro-Stalin. He also sought to deny asylum to Soviets agents who defected to the US.

Davies and his wife (Marjorie Merriweather Post) became great collectors of Russian art. They were able to acquire plenty of first rate pieces thanks to their friends in the Kremlin who had looted Russia (and Russians) on behalf of the Revolution and the Party.

After the Wheeling speech Tydings saw the danger that the “soft on communism” charge represented to the Democratic party in the upcoming election. He wrote Truman to warn him:

I strongly recommend for your own welfare, for the welfare of the country and lastly for the Welfare of the Democratic party that the present Communist inquiry not be allowed to worsen, but that you take bold, forthright and courageous action which I presume to say will do as much as anything I can think of to give you and your administration and party a tremendous advantage in the coming elections.

As Klehr and Radosh noted:

Senator McCarthy cynically used the Amerasia affair even though he was indifferent to the facts of the case. But so too did Senator Tydings, who preferred to find convenient scapegoats rather than be embarrassed by the truth.

Tydings, as chairman of the committee tasked with investigating communist infiltration of the State Department, instead used the committee to attack and discredit McCarthy. Its report was nakedly partisan. Tydings himself had strong personal and political reasons to see that the anti-communist issue was dead and buried before the 1950 election.

Yet the Tydings committee report is still used as conclusive evidence that McCarthy never had evidence for his charges. Hence, he was just a drunken demagogue stoking populst paranoia.

Note the legerdemain at work to maintain the narrative. McCarthy's crusade must be viewed through the lense of his political opportunism, personal faults, and tactical missteps. The political motives, personal interests, and repellant beliefs of his opponents are carefully excluded from the analysis.

McCarthy and his critics: No sauce for the gander

I've noted before that Joseph McCarthy's negative image has remained unchanged despite the flood of revelations about Soviet intelligence activities in the US. Further, that much of the damaging material on McCarthy focuses on his personal behavior and that of his staff, his pre-Senate career, and his aptitude as a television performer. Finally, that much of the “evidence” used to disparage the senator is of dubious value-- unsourced gossip, innuendo, and partisan hype.

Which supposedly adds up to something like this: The investigations were partisan exercises, not serious fact-finding. McCarthy was a Republican cat's-paw and a tool for the China Lobby. His popularity was fueled by bigotry and populist resentment. McCarthy, a lifelong liar and braggart, was not to be trusted. The messenger and the message could be rightly dismissed. Red scare. Witchhunt. Paranoid style. Anti-intellectualism. Case closed.

It is better to be approximately right than precisely wrong.
― Warren Buffett

But what if McCarthy was approximately right while his critics were wrong on both the big questions and exact details? That is one question that is studiously avoided in the mire of the journalism of personal destruction.

Another question this time relating to the narrative: What happens if we applied the “scrutinize the messengers; don't trust liars” rule to McCarthy's critics?

II

If McCarthy is untrustworthy because he exaggerated his war record, then what of his nemesis Edward R. Murrow? The doyen of CBS News and secular saint to journalists everywhere lied his education and experience as he scrambled for a toehold in the world of eastern media and NGOs.

Take the worst things said and written about McCarthy and he still looks angelic compared to his most persistent critic-- Drew Pearson. The discovery that he employed not one, but two Soviet assets should have prompted at least some rethinking about the Narrative. Then there is his collusion with Moscow to protect his brand and their operations. Surely Pearson's unfounded and libelous attacks on the anti-communist Secretary of Defense James Forrestal deserve examination. (Forrestal and McCarthy were polar opposites in nearly every respect. Practically the only things they had in common was a fierce opposition to Joe Stalin and sustained calumny at the hands of Drew Pearson.

Pearson cheated on his wives and cheated his business partner who helped launch “Washington Merry-Go-Round”. Pearson, a Quaker, took advantage of his patriotic partner who joined the army after Pearl Harbor. Robert Allen lost an arm; Drew Pearson gained a business.

Pearson's legman Jack Anderson admitted that he committed perjury to cover up his and Pearson's crimes in their Get McCarthy crusade. Yet Anderson's gossip-filled “biography” of the senator is still cited by writers today.

Thomas C. Reeves:

But every chapter contained factual errors, slanted interretations, partisan conclusions, and even occasional fiction.

As is Richard Rovere's biography. What is not often mentioned is that Rovere – who covered McCarthy as the New Yorker's Washington correspondent – wrote for the CPUSA's New Masses during the 1930s. The Narrative demands that we trust this one-time Stalinist stooge to properly assess the extent of communist subversion and the possibilities of liberal cover-ups. It also demands that we ignore the fact that Rovere was an ardent defender of Alger Hiss -- again, not a good look for a man who claims expertise on the question communist subversion.

Ralph de Toledano:

Richard Rovere, formerly an editor of the Communist New Masses, later The New Yorker’s Washington correspondent, at the National Press Club bar, holding forth on the hundreds of lives Joe McCarthy had destroyed. “Name one,” I ask. Silence, then, “Well, he’s shacking up with Roy Cohn, isn’t he? And how many spies has he caught?”

III

If McCarthy's critics were held to the same standard that they apply to the senator, then the melodramatic Good vs. Evil framing falls apart. And we cannot have that.

McCarthy must be portrayed as evil because he represented a threat to the newly empowered experts and the mediators of democracy.

For all the moral posturing and journalistic justifications, the treatment of McCarthy was simply liberals, left-wingers, and communists following the Munzenberg template.

Don't argue with them, Make them stink in the nose of the world. Make people curse and abominate them, Make them shudder with horror.

While claiming to uphold American values, McCarthy's enemies often resorted to Stalinist tactics.

During the 1950s the friends and supporters of McCarthy complained bitterly about the 'double-standard' employed by his liberal critics. In particular, they charged that the righteous people who condemned his name-callng were the same people who called him a Nazi, a jackal, and a thug; that the people who yelled loudest at his 'dirty' tactics were the same people who spread rumors of his alleged homosexuality and hired spies to infiltrate his office and dredge up material about the personal habits of his aides. Needless to say, the liberal press ignored these shameful and frequently illegal acts; they were too busy portraying the senator as an enemy of democratic institutions and free society.

There is a good bit of truth to this contention. McCarthy's critics could be hypocritical and cruel. Many viewed him as the new Hitler, a man to be stopped quickly and at all costs. The means were often irrelevant.

David M. Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy

Related:

Mediated democracy and the temptations of Leninism

On the utility of “Fascist”

The essence of “McCarthyism”: The Administrative State strikes back

McCarthyism: More Philby parallels

All of the Cambridge spies worked to minimize and conceal their communist activity at university. For Maclean and Blunt it was as simple as brushing it off as youthful exuberance and naïve idealism. Kim Philby and Guy Burgess went so far as joining fascist and pro-Nazi organizations at the behest of their Soviet masters.

To be a good conspirator one had to be a chameleon.

As the case of Drew Pearson illustrates, Moscow was always willing to help a useful asset hide their true colors.

The Cambridge spies were successful, in large measure, because the British establishment was happy to trust them as they were “the right sort of people.” Their “explanations” were accepted without question and their past was never scrutinized.*

Antony Percy:

The fatal misconception that leading officers in MI5 harboured, namely that communism in well-educated Britons was a mere affectation of no consequence, encouraged them to ignore the warning signs and trust such characters because of their obvious intelligence and savoir-faire.

As historian and some time intelligence officer Hugh Trevor-Roper put it:

I hasten to add that, although I myself knew of Philby’s communist past, it would never have occurred to me, at that time, to hold it against him. Indeed, I was rather cheered than depressed by this unusual recruitment. My own view, like that of most of my contemporaries, was that our superiors were lunatic in their anti-communism. Many of our friends had been, or had thought themselves, communists in the 1930s; and we were shocked that such persons should be debarred from public service on account of mere juvenile illusions which anyway they had now shed: for such illusions could not survive the shattering impact of Stalin’s Pact with Hitler in 1939.

The same thing happened in the US where Soviet agents like Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White never lacked for establishment defenders.

Just something to keep in mind when reading anti-McCarthy polemics today.

For instance, this is Ronald Radosh attacking M. Stanton Evans for his pro-McCarthy Blacklisted by History:**

Consider his treatment of liberal editor James Wechsler. Evans acknowledges that calling Wechsler to testify was a “dubious move,” and that McCarthy “should never have had the editor before the committee.” But Wechsler was called and questioned, and McCarthy’s treatment of him reflects why so many regarded him as a bully and a demagogue. All one has to do is read the transcripts. You will not find them quoted in Evans’s book. What you will find is that McCarthy told the fierce anti-Communist editor that he had not really broken with the Communists, and was “serving them very, very actively.” This was preposterous, since the Communist Daily Worker regularly attacked Wechsler for being anti-Communist. McCarthy thought that was all a big ruse so that Wechsler’s New York Post readers would believe him when he attacked McCarthy in his own paper.

Note how Radosh accepts at face value (“fierce anti-Communist”) Wechsler's claim that he broke with the communists in the mid-1930s and became their committed opponent. No mention of the fact that the editor somehow managed to find it within himself to work along side outright Stalinists at The Nation and PM. Nor that the anti-McCarthy anti-communist worked side by side with communists and fellow travelers to bring down Martin Dies when his HUAC was uncovering Stalin's network in the 1940s.

As for the attacks by the communist press – please see the strange case of Drew Pearson.

Buckley and Bozell made a rational defense of this hearing in McCarthy and His Enemies:

With respect to the Wechslers, McCarthy is saying two things: (a) it is not unreasonable to suppose that Communist "renegades" who are now demonstrated anti-antic communists, are pulling the wall over our eyes, for it is clearly clearly conceivable that there are men around us who for tactical reasons, have been instructed by the Party to feign conversion and order to attend more effectively to the Party's business; and (b)ex-Communists must therefore be looked at more skeptically than other persons when the question of their loyalty to the United States arises. They, McCarthy is saying, must prove their sincerity in a very particular sort of way -- by doing their earnest best to expose the conspiracy of which they were a party, by disclosing, for example, the names of their former confederates. This is a special form of penance that McCarthy is in effect asking for. He may have gone too far, but he is reasonable in applying a standard different from that applicable to persons innocent of involvement in the Communist conspiracy.

Radosh, a Red Diaper baby and former leftist, shares much in common with the useful idiots who protected and promoted Philby, Burgess, and the other Soviet spies. There is the quick acceptance of the of claim to have broken with the Stalinists with no interest to see if it is really true. There is the same fear that the wrong sort of people are using the spy issue and are attacking the right kind (our kind) of people. There is, finally, the rather bizarre belief that the best people to root out communists are people who were once duped by the communists.

Antony Percy:

The voices and influence of those who recognised the starkness of the Communist threat best (Knight, Archer, Curry, and even Kell) were being drowned by those with leftist sympathies or who were too indulgent to the socialist cause.

Daniel J. Flynn cut to the heart of the issue:

While Whittaker Chambers, Sidney Hook, and James Burnham gained a level of respect as anticommunists, those anticommunists never foolish enough to have supported the Communists are almost uniformly portrayed as clumsy oafs whose zeal clouded their judgment. Another criterion that helps determine whether intellectuals’ anoint anti-Communists as heroes or goats involved the dichotomy between men of action and men of ideas. Intellectuals, naturally, favor the latter. From the sidelines, the anticommunist intellectuals were free from the mud and grime. But on the field, Pat McCarran, J. Edgar Hoover, and Joe McCarthy got dirty. The opposition’s game plan remained the same regardless of the adversary: declare a witch hunt, focus on inaccuracies, smear the accuser, and hubristically portray Communists as defenders of civil liberties.

* Arnold Deutsch, the man who recruited of the Cambridge spies understood this British weakness and counted on it to protect his budding agents. As he told his bosses in Moscow: "Given that the Communist movement in these universities is on a mass scale and that there is a constant turnover of students, it follows that individual Communists whom we pluck out of the Party will pass unnoticed, both by the Party itself and by the outside world. People forget about them. And if at some time they do remember that they were once Communists, this will be put down to a passing fancy of youth, especially as those concerned are scions of the bourgeoisie. It is up to us to give the individual recruit a new (non-Communist) political personality."

** In the pages of National Review no less.

McCarthyism: A Philby footnote

Interesting talk by the biographer of Soviet spy Guy Burgess.

Near the end of the video he addresses a key question about the fall of the Cambridge Ring: Why did they use Burgess to save Maclean when that meant Philby would be caught in the blowback?

Lownie put that question to a former KGB man who answered that it did not matter because the Soviet Union "had so many spies" in the west that Philby and Burgess were expendable.

Maybe that was just braggadocio from an old guy who worked for the side that lost. There is, however, no getting around the fact that the KGB seemed to toss away two valuable spies for no good reason.

As Verne Newton put it: "Moscow did not gamble with Philby's future. They did not even sacrifice it. They threw it away."

The key point, it seems to me, is that Philby, Burgess, and Maclean were British spies with access to American secrets. That should have made them especially valuable. Yet, there is no denying that Moscow treated them with a carelessness bordering on contempt.

 

Something else to ponder:

Robert Lamphere, the FBI agent who was central to exploiting the VENONA breakthrough, wrote this in his memoirs:

I must admit that I initially doubted that Philby was an active Soviet spy. I reasoned that a real Soviet agent would have worked harder at establushning closer relations with me and other key people; I understood that Philby had concentrated on the CIA, which was certainly a KGB target, but why hadn't he taken the opportunity to penetrate the FBI as well? Since Philby hadn't spent much time on us, I temporarily concluded that he must not have been an active spy.

Philby's indifference is particularly notable because he arrived in Washington a few months after Moscow lost a well-placed source within the DOJ who fed them valuable information about FBI counterintelligence (Judith Coplon).

One possibility is that they were not seen as valuable at Dzerzhinsky Square. Perhaps the paranoid Stalinists who ran the spy agencies deemed the Cambridge Ring too good to be true, i.e. double agents.

Another possibility is that the KGB and GRU actually did have many active sources in London and Washington-- so many that they could afford to lose Philby and Burgess just to help Maclean avoid interrogation.

If this is true it requires a radical revision of the McCarthy narrative.

The first draft of history declared that there was never a communist underground in Washington; the senator was a demagogue who launched a witch-hunt. The revised (current) narrative holds that there were communist agents but Harry S. Truman and John E. Hoover had smashed the spy rings. McCarthy is still a demagogue who launched a witch-hunt.

If Lownie's source is correct, then that narrative is wrong. Soviet intelligence still had assets in place and the government was not doing enough to root them out.

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The wilderness of mirrors and games journalists play

One easy trick to turn a partisan into an honest reporter

When collussion is part of building a brand

Winston Churchill called columnist Drew Pearson “the most colossal liar in the United States”. He was, for a time, the most influential journalist in America. He was an early and persistent critic of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Pearson and his “leg man” Jack Anderson wrote much of the first draft of the history of McCarthyism.

Churchill had a point. Pearson lied about the targets of his muckraking (these also included Richard Nixon, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Whittaker Chambers, and James Forrestal.) He lied about the Soviet spy on his staff.

Most intriguingly, he lied about his method and his relations with powerful politicins.

Pearson posed as an honest muckraker: the dauntless investigator rooting out corruption and wrong-doing. He was attacked by all sides because he did not play favorites. Joe McCarthy hated him, but so did Harry Truman.

It was only a pose – a carefully cultivated pose designed to fool the rubes.

Early in the Kennedy administration, Pearson explained to Pierre Salinger how he wanted to play the game:

I suggested that when the going got tough and I got too much hell from Republican editors, I would ask Kennedy a favor—namely, that he do to me what Harry Truman did: blast me. This would really set me up with the press. Salinger said that when the time was desperate to call on him.

Salinger was happy to play the game because he knew Pearson was on his team. The reporter was perfectly willing to let JFK know what question he woulld as at a news conference so the President could prepare a response.

In his diary, Pearson recorded a similar agreement with Khrushchev's son-in-law. The brave scourge of Joe McCarthy and James Forrestal needed to collude with Soviet apparatchiks to bolster his anti-communist credentials.

Did the Soviets play along with Pearson because they thought he was on their team? That the Soviets agreed to play the game shows that they viewed Pearson as a useful asset.

Interestingly enough, McCarthy accused Pearson of playing exactly this game when he "smeared" him on the floor of the Senate:

In order to maintain his value, it was necessary that he occasionally threw pebbles at communism and communist generally so as to have the false reputation of being anti-communist.

Pearson's value went beyond his attacks on anti-communists and cold warriors. The Mitrokhin archives show that the KGB saw Pearson as an effective conduit for disinformation.

The Soviets must surely have been pleased with Pearson in the aftermath of the JFK assassination. He did yeoman's work to divert attention from one inconvenient fact: the assassin was a committed communist. Initially he led the “Blame Dallas” chorus which tried to tie the murder to conservatives and anti-communists. Later he promoted baseless conspiracy theories about anti-Castro Cubans and Mafia hit men. In between he attacked the Secret Service and the FBI.

There is an intersting footnote to Pearson's machinations. In his scathing review of M. Stanton Evans's Blacklisted by History, Ronald Radosh brought up the case of James Wechsler to illustrate McCarthy's perfidity:

Consider his treatment of liberal editor James Wechsler. Evans acknowledges that calling Wechsler to testify was a “dubious move,” and that McCarthy “should never have had the editor before the committee.” But Wechsler was called and questioned, and McCarthy’s treatment of him reflects why so many regarded him as a bully and a demagogue. All one has to do is read the transcripts. You will not find them quoted in Evans’s book. What you will find is that McCarthy told the fierce anti-Communist editor that he had not really broken with the Communists, and was “serving them very, very actively.” This was preposterous, since the Communist Daily Worker regularly attacked Wechsler for being anti-Communist. McCarthy thought that was all a big ruse so that Wechsler’s New York Post readers would believe him when he attacked McCarthy in his own paper.

In light of the Soviet's entente with Pearson, McCarthy's charge was hardly perposterous. A regime capable of running the Trust and dozens of other deception operations is more than capable of attacking an asset in order to make said asset appear independent. Stephen Koch notes that the Munzenbeg propaganda machine was happy to make use of non-communists and "innocuous" anti-communists "to provide it with the necessary air of independence."

McCarthy may have been wrong. He was certainly too undisciplined and impetuous to present the question effectively. But it was hardly a "preposterous" idea.

Harry Gold, McCarthy and the “Pink Dentist”

Harry Gold's career as a Soviet spy offers a vital but little understood insight into the Army-McCarthy hearings and the fake narratives that surround it.

The approved narrative from the patron saint of experty intellectuals:

Real Communists were usually too insignificant to warrant lengthy pursuit; McCarthy did not trouble himself much over an obscure radical dentist promoted by the army when he could use the case to strike at the army itself, and beyond the army at the Eisenhower administration.

Decades later, the song remains the same. From Sam Tannenhaus:

The best McCarthy could do was dredge up a 'pink' dentist at a military base in New Jersey.

We are supposed to understand that a pink dentist like Irving Peress could never be a spy because he had no access to secrets. Therefore, his promotion was no reflection on Army security procedures.

That “understanding” relies on a profound ignorance of how the Soviets operated. Gold's career shows that a successful spy ring requires a whole network of operatives who themselves have no connection to vital secrets.

Soviet espionage networks in the United States would not have been able to function without the assistance of a number of dedicated support personnel whose role was as essential as that of the sources who actually took documents from the government offices in which they worked or communicated secrets to which they were privy.

John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev, Spies

Further, Peress's profession made him especially attractive to the Soviets.

According to NKVD defector Alexander Orlov “the Soviets favored particularly the use of the surgeries of 'trusted dentists and physicians', which were the preferred sites for really important meetings.” They offered privacy and a convenient place to photograph documents. They were the perfect covert hub for communications and support. M. Stanton Evans notes that both the Bentley and Chambers spy rings included dentists as central figures. A dentist was also key player among the agents who surrounded Robert Oppenheimer in California.

Weinstein, Abraham: New York dentist who provided dental services for many CPUSA officials involved in its clandestine work as well as for many government employees who spied for the Soviets. The FBI concluded that Winstein acted as a communications intermediary; that many of the dental visits were a cover for passing of information to Weinstein, who then passed the information on to another party. Elizabeth Bentley identified a contact of Jacob Golos's who was a dentist and whom she knew only as Charlie. From her description, the FBI concluded that Weinstein was Charlie.
***
Philip Rosenblitt, a Communist dentist in New York, was part of the courier system for delivering Soviet money to Soviet intelligence networks in the United States.

Haynes and Kleher, Venona

Peress the man was never the real issue. His promotion, however, was an important matter for investigation. It suggested that the US Army was still lacksadaisical or worse when it came to security and counter-intelligence. This point was lost in the theatrics and agit-prop surrounding the Army-McCarthy hearings.

It remains absent in most of the histories of McCarthyism. In order to demonize McCarthy the Narrative must obscure that one key point: The Senator was broadly correct about the failures of the Administrative State to combat Soviet spying and infiltration.

As Nicholas von Hoffman put it back in the 1990s:

Point by point, Joe McCarthy got it all wrong and yet was still closer to the truth than those who ridiculed him.

Related:

The Katyn Massacre: Conspiracies and cover-ups

 

An unlikely hero

Harry Gold was a Philly chemist who worked as a courier and spy for Soviet intelligence for over a decade. He was central to the operations that sent atomic secrets from Los Alamos to Moscow.

He was a diligent and effective agent, yet he possessed neither the ideological fervor of the Rosenbergs nor the greed of Aldrich Ames.

Allen Hornblum notes in his biography of Gold that he was "one of the most denounced, slandered, and demonized figures in twentieth-century America."

The calumny heaped upon Gold during his life and long after his death was only partially due to his disloyalty and criminal acts. It had far more to do with his confession to those acts and his naming of others who had similarly served the Soviet Union. Harry Gold was the human tripwire that brought down a host of Americans who had spied for the Soviet Union during the 1930s and 1940s.

When confronted by the FBI, Gold quickly confessed and revealed everything he knew about the Soviet spy apparatus in America.

Much of the American Left despised Gold for that confession. For decades they portrayed him as a liar and neurotic fabulist as they sought to exonerate their sainted Rosenbergs.

Hornblum's biography corrects those slanders. The Harry Gold in this book comes across as decent and generous. What most impresses is his stoicism in the face of adversity. He owned up to his crimes, did his time without whining, and then did his best to rebuild his life after his parole.

McCarthy and History: Tainted sources and rotten fruit

The first draft of the history of McCarthyism was written by people whose own history has been ignored and covered-up.

Historian David Greenberg makes an interesting point about Watergate and the resurgence of anti-anti-communism in the 1970s:

Nixon's mendacity in Watergate and kindred crimes had the perverse effect of making all his previous victims seem virtuous -- even the scoundrels.

While Watergate helped rehabilitate Stalinists and traitors like Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, and Lillian Hellman, VENONA and the Soviet archives did nothing change the image of Joseph McCarthy.

The calcified narratives of McCarthyism are especially puzzling given the weak and corrupt sources which created it. The anti-McCarthy movement embraced lock-step Stalinists and actual Soviet spies. It then turned them into martyrs and victims of a “Red Scare”.

This smacks of desperation. But then the anti-McCarthy crusaders had good reason to be desperate.

II

Can you smear a real spy?

A striking aspect of our ossified “history” of McCarthyism is that the declassified documents do not just shed light on the senator and his targets. Perhaps even more interesting (and important) is what we have learned about the journalists and pundits who shaped the first draft of that history.

The one-time owner of the New Republic, Michael Straight, wrote a book about the Army-McCarthy hearings. Trial by Television appeared in the bibliographies of all the best and most fashionable books on the Red Scare and McCarthyism.

The book had a special piquancy because McCarthy had attacked Straight during the senator's investigation into Gustavo Duran who had married Straight's sister.

Duran entered the final and decisive confrontation. Members of the American embassy in London questioned his British friends, including the military historian Captain Basil Henry Liddell Hart, and Henry Walston, whose wife was a sister of Duran's wife. (So, too, was Michael Straight's wife-- McCarthy did not let pass the opportunity to smear the proprietor and editor of the New Republic .)

David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower

Then, in 1983, Michael Straight admitted that he had been a member of the infamous Cambridge spy ring.

That is, by any standard, quite the plot twist. Yet it made no discernible difference to the narrative.

Old habits die hard and much of journalism is little more than habitual pronouncements affirming the conventional wisdom.

The narrative, after all, “is controlled in the retelling of the story.”

BTW, McCarty was right about Duran as well.

Gustavo Duran "was a firmly committed Stalinist operative, serving the apparatus so flawlessly that he soon graduated to secret police work, in which, he quickly became a favored protege of the Soviet NKVD chief in Spain, Alexander Orlov, the man who, on Stalin's direct personal order, murdered Nin."
Stephen Koch, The Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passons, and the Murder of Jose Robles

Cedric Belfrage was another self-proclaimed “victim” of McCarthyism.

But the case which most forcefully demonstrated the government's refusal to tolerate criticism from the far Left was that of Cedric Belfrage, cofounder of the ALP's National Guardian, a resident alien of British nationality who had served briefly as an Allied press officer in Germany and had been named by Elizabeth Bentley as a wartime Soviet 'courier'. In 1950 Belfrage had been summoned to Immigration Service headquarters, where he refused to answer questions concerning his writings, views and associations.
David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower

McCarthy ordered an immigration officer to be present when an alien of long standing took the Fifth Amendment. The alien was Cedric Belfrage, an author who wrote for Hollywood fan magazines, had been Sam Goldwyn's press agent, and who had traveled to the Soviet Union in 1936. After taking the Fifth, Belfrage was arrested on a deportation warrant, held at Ellis Island, and then deported to Great Britain.
Haynes Johnson, The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism

Belfrage later wrote a book about his ordeal at the hands of paranoid Americans. When VENONA and Soviet documents revealed that he did, in fact, pass secrets to Moscow, it changed nothing in the minds of journalists and popular historians.

The Belfrage case also illustrates how government secrecy often puts traitors and bureaucrats in a tacit alliance. MI5 and MI6 were not keen to pursue Belfrage because it would have revealed clandestine British activities before Pearl Harbor.

Cedric Belfrage, the WW2 spy Britain was embarrassed to pursue

Further, after the embarrassment of Burgess and Maclean's escape, the intelligence bureaucrats were not anxious to air additional dirty laundry.

Coldspur:

Nigel West describes, in his study of MI6 chiefs At Her Majesty’s Secret Service, how senior MI6 officers were concerned that the pursuit of moles might harm the chances of getting their gongs.

Drew Pearson's syndicated column was a mish-mash of political gossip, official leaks masquerading as investigative journalism, and wild invective aimed at his long list of enemies. He cut corners, relied on bribery and blackmail, and was rarely troubled by the need to verify or fact-check a juicy and useful “scoop”. Yet, in the Red Scare narrative, he is a hero because he attacked McCarthy early and often.

Anti-McCarthyism is the left-wing's St. Crispin day. Bashing Joe gentled their condition “be they ne'er so vile”.

The Senator struck back by pointing out Pearson employed as a “leg man” one David Karr who had formerly worked for the New Masses-- the newspaper of the CPUSA. Pearson dismissed this as a youthful indiscretion of a kid who was eager to gain experience as a sportwriter.

Historians and journalists trusted the muckraker and chalked up another example of slander by McCarthy.

We now know that not only was Karr literally a card-carrying member of the CPUSA, but that he also had a history of contacts with Soviet intelligence. Those contacts went on for decades after Pearson vouched for his probity and loyalty.

Drew Pearson also represents a key faction of the anti-McCarthy cabal. Most of the Senator's opponents took great pains to present themselves as dedicated anti-communists. They maintained that they were opposed McCarthy because he was reckless, crude, and attacked innocent people. They insisted that people like themselves were better anti-communists because they were wiser and more thoughtful than the bumptious senator from Appleton, Wisconsin.

Historians have accepted their self-appraisal with little skepticism. It is probably worth re-evaluating their assessment.

TBC